Say you discover a transaction that was recorded using the wrong QuickBooks feature. For example, you wrote a check in the QuickBooks’ Write Checks window to pay a bill and sent the payment off to the vendor. Now, it’s a month later and you see the vendor’s bill in QuickBooks: its status is unpaid and overdue. (Because you used the Write Checks window to write a check to the vendor, QuickBooks thinks the bill hasn’t been paid.) Even worse, you’ve already reconciled the check you wrote during your last bank account reconciliation. Fixing this error is as easy as 1-2-3:

Projects have a lot of moving parts—objectives to achieve, tasks to complete, people to manage, and more. When those parts interact as smoothly as a Swiss watch, everyone involved with the project is happier: the customer, stakeholders, team members who do the work, and project manager. Here are five tips to help any project run more smoothly.

1. Start by identifying what the project is really about.

Like starting your day with a nutritious breakfast, figuring out the point of the project makes everything that follows work better. Focusing on the right goal from the beginning of the project makes it a lot easier to deliver what the customer wants at the project’s end. I can’t say it any better than Yogi Berra did: “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going because you might not get there.”

Some project goals are obvious—for example, getting a raccoon out of your pantry. But for most projects, you need to chip away to uncover the goal and the other elements that define the project.